Left-Wing Hates America, Says Author

(CNSNews.com) - A conservative author lashed out against the militant Left Wednesday for celebrating America's vices and downplaying her virtues. "In other countries, you have governments and people that inflate virtues of a nation but downplay the vices. In America, it's just the opposite," said Daniel Flynn, author of "Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness."

Flynn, who serves as the executive director of Washington-based Accuracy in Academia, said the Left would like the world to believe that America stands for the "slave master's whip;" the 1968 My Lai massacre in which American soldiers slaughtered a village of innocent Vietnamese civilians; and the fatal beating of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old homosexual student.

But most Americans have a different perspective of their country, he noted.

"They view things like the soldiers sticking by Washington through the winter at Valley Forge; they view the Thirteenth Amendment; the promise at Ellis Island that immigrants coming through there see; Edison turning out the lights; Lindbergh touching down at La Bourget (Paris); the soldiers storming the beaches at Normandy," he said. "That's the America that we all know."

But instead of accentuating the positive aspects of America, Flynn said the Left chooses to promote an anti-American ideology and agenda, an influence that has gained prominence on college campuses across the country.

"It used to be on the campuses that the folks who would be honored were people who helped build this country, people like Washington or Lincoln or Jefferson," he said in his speech at the Leadership Institute in Washington. "Today, the folks that are being honored are people who hate this country, who try to destroy it."

Flynn chose his alma mater, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to illustrate his point. He said the college's 26-story library is named in honor of W.E.B. DuBois, the controversial founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

"DuBois was a guy who renounced his [American] citizenship; who went to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and lived there for the last few years of his life; joined the Communist Party; and when Stalin died, eulogized Stalin as a 'great and courageous man," Flynn said. He added that DuBois was eventually kicked out of the NAACP for his advocacy of racial separatism

Flynn said he could understand why a communist country would want to honor DuBois, the way former Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung did in 1959, but objects to the "several hundred" schools across America that have named buildings and institutes after the anti-American, black communist.

Diversity Double-Talk

"The left talks a great deal about diversity, but the diversity that exists on college campuses is a diversity where you have a faculty that looks like the United Nations, but thinks like a San Francisco coffee house," Flynn said.

For example, he said the Left hates Christianity's influence in American society because it is an "intolerant" religion.

"But if you look at America, people of all faiths can practice their religion here," Flynn said. "You're not going to be able to practice your faith in a lot of places outside of western civilization."

Flynn said the Left also scorns America for being a xenophobic and racist country. However, he said those claims could be easily rebuked.

"From 1820 to 1930, we took in 60 percent of the world's immigrants during that period of time and today we take in more immigrants than we did at that time," Flynn said. "How does the Left explain the fact that every decade you've got tens of millions of people trying to get into this country, and most of these folks are people of color?"

Blame it on America

Prior to John Walker Lindh's capture in Afghanistan, Flynn said the so-called American Taliban sent an email to his mother that questioned her loyalty to America. "I really don't know what your big attachment to America is all about," Lindh wrote. "What has America ever done for anybody?"

To start with, Flynn said, America has given more than $500 billion dollars in aid to foreign countries since World War II. "This is roughly $500 billion more than the rest of the world has given us," he noted.

Yet, Flynn said some anti-American recipients of U.S. foreign aid refuse to acknowledge America's tremendous outreach efforts. Instead, some of those struggling nations express their gratitude by burning the American flag in the streets and chanting, "Down with America," sentiments that he said are often expressed by the Left in America.

But Flynn said the most blatant examples of the Left's "blame America" philosophy arrived in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Some on the Left celebrated the attacks, others justified it or gave reasons why the attacks happened ... basically, to put the blame on America," Flynn said. "They didn't do any critical thinking, they just blamed America."